


But.

by Ashling



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, and IM THE ONE WHO FUCKING WROTE IT, fuck it post it she said (to herself), i licherally do not know if this is Antoinette Conway & Stephen Moran, it's about the suffering it's about the tenderness, or if it's Antoinette Conway/Stephen Moran, to quote hellsite dot tunglr, vulnerability is clumsy but it’s the only thing worth anything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-03-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23239216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Antoinette doesn't remember falling asleep, but she'll never forget waking up.
Relationships: Antoinette Conway & Stephen Moran, Antoinette Conway/Stephen Moran
Comments: 8
Kudos: 17





	But.

One day, some day down the line, not even on a particularly important day, not even on a particularly important case, things go bad. There's no ominous sense around it, there's no warning, but they're walking side by side, shoulders level, just the way they're supposed to be, and then everything goes to shit.

Antoinette moves fast. Antoinette moves quick like it's in her bones, because it is. She was once a little girl in a big world and she had enemies even then, not just the kind that auditioned terrorists and thugs for the part of her missing father just for kicks and giggles, but those too. Enemies personal and impersonal, and she got used to them. Antoinette moves like an enemy could be waiting for her anywhere, because some part of her still believes that. The average garda has decent reflexes; the average detective has better ones; Antoinette is far from average. She's faster than Steve, by a fraction. That fraction counts.

She had made such fun of Steve when he bought a leather sofa—the deep-cushioned, ridiculous luxury of it practically demanded derision—although she'd ended up using more than he ever did. The chair at the hospital is a far cry from that, but it has a footrest that swings out and a back that lets down, so she can lie pretty much horizontal. So she can sleep, hypothetically. Hypothetically she can fall asleep if she wants. She wishes like hell she could read his letter now. She wasn't stupid enough to throw it away, at least; it's in her safe, along with her passport and a photo of her mum from way back when her mum still smiled so hard that her eyes would nearly disappear in her cheeks. Also in the safe is a second gun that she shouldn't own, but that's beside the point. She feels very old, like the Antoinette of yesterday was very young and very fucking foolish.

The hospital food is fine. She doesn't really notice it. People keep dropping in and she feels awkward every time, like she shouldn't be there, but also she'd fight tooth and nail if she was told to leave and the fight never comes. How is it possible to feel this exhausted and yet still feel awkward. His sisters are nice. nice like he is, and the younger one has the exact same color of his hair but the older one gets the same look in her eyes as he does when he's worried. He hasn't opened his eyes in a while now. Doctors say it's not such a very long time for his eyes to be closed, they're ruling out all kinds of things, but at this point Antoinette doesn't trust them any more than she trusts herself.

Antoinette doesn't remember falling asleep, but she'll never forget waking up. She's buried so deep that the sound of his voice (faint, raspy, but unmistakably his) doesn't even spark fear or hope in her. She just thinks, _Steve_ , with no feeling at all, some faint instinct maybe, of needing to come at that call, and then she opens her eyes and half-sits up and experiences something akin to being hit by a freight train. "How long was I out?" he says, like they have an insane case and he was just taking a quick nap. For a minute she does not know the answer, knows nothing, and then he says her name with a note of concern in it, and she says, "I'll get the doctor."

For a long, long time, she thinks she's numb, but that's not really what's happening. It's actually that she's scared, scared in a way she thought she'd left behind in childhood, so fucking scared that she doesn't even notice, because the tension in her muscles is becoming second nature, and so is the way she can't bear to have long conversations with certain people. Stephen's older sister, O'Neill or his wife, fuck, even a brief visit from Frank Mackey was painful, intolerable, and for all the wrong reasons.

Stephen's recovery is very good, everyone tells her. Amazing, they say, but always with the qualifier: _given what he's been through_. As usual, he is an inconvenient little bastard; he makes her feel like she's stuck in a separate reality because he's just so fucking chipper. He gloats about combat wounds and he predicts that they'll get some kind of citation and he reads the newspaper—an actual FUCKING newspaper like a man from the 1950s—and against all odds, he doesn't get an infection even once.

He does get quiet, though. Way more often than he used to. She misses all the chatter she used to hate him for, and the silence worries her too. She'd much rather know what he's thinking, it turns out, even if what he's thinking is painfully mundane and irritating and often makes her think _Jesus, Steve, will you shut your hole already_.

Antoinette helps him a lot, all during the hospital stay, and they manage that pretty well. Stephen doesn't seem to feel embarrassed about needing help, and when it comes time for things like the nurse replacing his bandages, Antoinette doesn't look away. She just does this thing where she floats a little way away from herself, like she's watching herself look at his wounds in a movie, the wet red gape of them. She actually doesn't know why she's doing it, the first few times, because the whole thing is such a haze and something about the hospital seems to make her act fucking thick. But. It's not gruesome curiosity. It's not like she thinks she can figure out any further information about his condition by looking at his body; the doctors have that covered. It's just that—and she only figures this out when he's discharged from the hospital—it's just that she fully expects to be the one changing his bandages when they go home. And they do, and she is, and absolutely nobody questions it with even a look, and she feels like she's getting away with something. Driving away from the hospital, she feels her heartbeat going faster than it should. She wants to stomp on the gas like she usually would, but. Something something something something cargo. She doesn't think too hard on that either. She's becoming very vigilant about not looking herself in the eye.

Home isn't restful. Shit is fucking exhausting. painkillers are simultaneously too powerful (she's seen plenty of people get addicted, easy) and not nearly good enough. Antoinette can tell when he's not sleeping, when he's just lying there awake, but if he wants to say something then he can say something, and if not she'll just lie there too. She took the cushions from the sofa and made herself a bed on the floor, and Stephen doesn't comment on it, probably because when she was making it, she shot him a glare. How shitty that on top of everything else, her most common tactic (Look At Me And Perish, if she's feeling threatened, and these days she always is) now makes her feel guilty. But.

Some things are alright. Some things are undeniably getting better. Slowly. He eats a bit more as days go by. Thank god for the wives of the other detectives, because they seem to know the kinds of things to make and how to make them. Antoinette's never made homemade soup in her life, but the freezer's got enough to feed an army. Stephen complains about it, which she likes, because she still hates how cheerful he is a lot of the time. (She is fully aware of how selfish this is. Nonetheless.)

Stephen moves on his own a lot now, and there's plenty of furniture around for him to grab onto if he needs to. She finds that she misses it, hovering next to him. She doesn't miss worrying about whether he'll fall, and if he does, where she can grab him that won't hurt him, where would be the best place to lay him down. (The one time he did fall, earlier, she managed to grab him around the right bicep, where he was still whole, but he went down onto the kitchenette floor anyway. Slower, but still, and when his knee bashed the linoleum he made a sound like an animal five seconds from roadkill.)

She doesn't miss the danger of that, she just misses the closeness. She probably also misses the way he used to hold onto her. She'd shuffle backwards as he walked forwards and she'd be telling him half a dozen different reasons why his team was shit and had absolutely no shot and his mouth would go tense and his hand would suddenly be grabbing her right where her shoulder met her neck, the base of his thumb pressed against her collarbone, fingertips digging in. And he'd stop and just stand there for a minute while she told him further information about why the coach was actually worth less, in terms of strategic intelligence, than the ninety-two-year-old regular at her local. While she told him this she'd be hoping he didn't start swaying and have to sit down, and nine times out of ten he'd be fine, and let go of her, and keep walking. She misses it now, but she doesn't miss the waiting to find out what kind of a day it was going to be.

His stomach settles. he's not thrown up in four days. He can take longer and longer visits with his younger sister even though said visits are not what anyone would call restful, but his sister is the only one who treats him like nothing is wrong. Antoinette is jealous of that. There's a list of things he needs that she can't give him, and it's a long fucking list, but normalcy is near the top and she's just fucking incapable of it, no matter how doggedly she keeps her mouth shut and goes through the motions.

Sometimes, he makes Antoinette watch stupid foreign films with him, which means she has to go get the sofa cushions from the bedroom and then he sits at one end, watching the black and white screen intently like the Cultured Man he is trying for (classic Stephen, still waiting to see who he'll become when he grows up). Meanwhile she sits at the other end of the sofa playing zombie tower defense games and feeling very close to peaceful.

There's a visit from the home nurse after one of these nights. The nurse removes the rest of the dietary restrictions and tells him he can take short walks outside (although he probably still shouldn't drive) and also is he keeping his appointments with his therapist? (He is. The therapist is a short, squat woman with a snub nose and cuddly-looking sweaters, offset by the single most butch haircut Antoinette has ever seen. And despite, again, trusting nobody, Antoinette kind of wants to trust her.) When the nurse leaves, Stephen is jubilant. He says something along the lines of "Fuck my bank account" followed by something about getting a burger delivered, followed by something about does Antoinette want one? And she does, but also it's really hard to fucking talk right now. When she locked and bolted the door behind the nurse, she knew she wanted to cry and she wasn't sure she would be able to stop herself and also. She is feeling pretty sure now he's not going to die. Which. It turns out. Is a big change to absorb.

When he puts his hand on her shoulder, it's to steady her, this time. "Took you long enough," he says, and it's not the softness that's the worst of it, it's not the warmth that's the worst of it: it's that he understands. She wants to tell him. She also wants to say, _shut up_ , but some vestigial instinct inside her is screaming that if she says that, or anything like that, she will fall right back into the old way and she will never claw her way out. Anyways she doesn't actually want him to shut up. He's been naked in front of her plenty of times now but that's nothing to the way his voice wraps itself around her name, careful in the only way she can stand, careful not because she's breakable, careful because he does actually fucking care. She wants to bury herself in him and never come out but she still doesn't want to touch him anywhere near the chest or stomach or left arm so she just sort of leans in a little, knocks her head against his, her temple against his cheek, her face in her hands. Any other time, place, person, and this much sobbing would be soul-destroyingly shameful, but any other time, place, person and she'd have no reason to do it. So it's wet and it's messy but it doesn't feel as catastrophic as it should. It feels like one long exhale after holding her breath in for a month. 

Later, another Film, this one blessedly in color and with some action. Old, though, and about Englishmen, which sucks, but with plenty of scheming and swords, which is a bit better. Antoinette has her arm along the back of the sofa, like a nervous schoolboy at the theater with his crush, except she's not nervous. She's been consumed with fear, and she's been awkward, and she's been enraged, and she's been so exhausted she could barely move, but for a month at least, nervousness has never entered the equation. Stephen falls asleep before the movie is over, but she lets it keep running. Onscreen a king is dying horribly. Antoinette pumps her right fist, and on the sofa her left arm is falling asleep under the weight of Stephen's head, and his hair makes her a little itchy. But. Well, anyways. She goes with him when he goes to bed, doesn't tuck him in or anything, just kind of hangs around killing more zombies on her phone, when he says, "Come here" and knocks on the bed twice with a fist like he's asking to enter a door. Antoinette doesn't waste breath asking why or saying she doesn't want to. Just, "Can't," hastily followed by, "I'd roll over and crush you."

He doesn't miss a beat. "You don't sleep that much." Which is true. Except that night, she listens to him breathe. He snores lightly sometimes, but most of the time, when she's sleeping on the sofa cushions on the floor, she actually can't hear him unless she holds in her breath and strains for it. Here beside him it's easy. They can both breathe and she can hear it.

In the morning, she wakes up when Stephen wakes her up, the sun streaming in through the windows, late, and he's already on his phone. An odd role reversal. He hooks a finger under a stray strand of hair that's fallen across her face, lifts it away. "Doctor's appointment in an hour," he says. "You'll want to eat before then." "Okay," she says, and for five minutes she just lays there and speculates about all the paperwork piling up at Dublin Castle waiting just for her, and then he counters with all the hospital paperwork he'll have to contend with, and her hand is curled around his right bicep, the uninjured one. They are not talking in order to pretend they are not touching, they're just doing both things at the same time, talking and touching. Antoinette thinks something she had thought a long while ago, standing with him in the shadow of Dublin Castle, McCann's arrest minutes behind them: she wouldn't mind doing this forever. She could do this forever. And. She wants to.

They run out of shit to complain about surprisingly quickly. She sits up, helps Stephen sit up. His hair is like a kid's, a little too long and sticking up in weird ways, cowlicks run amok. Undoubtedly they'll have an argument about what music to play on the way to the hospital; it's a pretty long drive, and Antoinette can only stand an orchestra when it's all pumped up for a movie soundtrack, otherwise the pretension of it all overwhelms her in under ten minutes, and more often than not, they end up turning off the radio altogether. The little irritations are coming back to them now, and as much as they still genuinely piss her off, they're also some kind of vital sign, like a heartbeat. They're still here.

"Good to go?" Stephen says. In that slant of window sunlight, his grey eyes are clear. Antoinette says, "Yeah."


End file.
